Mandarine. Dominic Billings
managers, lest she expose the inadequacies she herself had identified under a supervisor's purview.
Time was an ongoing constraint in observing samples of contaminant. Site conditions allowing for entry of dust were preventatively upheld along the plant's perimeter.
A constant source of audit was the collagen-derived gelatine. Gelatine was produced from a broth of protein boiled from animal bones. Given her prior employ, she scarcely found this gruesome, but rather a reality of the human trophic level at the food chain apex, capable of industrialising its prey.
She betrayed to herself the irony of something as benign and jolly as a colourful, sweetened, gelatine dessert, as being primarily constituted by the boiled connective tissues of heavy, quadrupedal mammals.
Child-friendly candies like gummy bears, jellybeans and marshmallows, hydrolysed into smaller proteins from the by-products of the meatpackers, refuse sent to the Pud for the boiling of tendons, ligaments and skin of domesticated cattle and pigs.
Alternative gelling agents had been trialled in the form of carrageenan, derived from red seaweed, serving double-duty as a thickener, but the inputs of by-products from the nearby meatpacking were elected to be ultimately more cost-effective.
The tool of Gidelia's survival within the ranks of Pud, thus her source of sustained residence, was the wielded threat of deportation for intransigent work-floor staff. The floor staff unanimously in a state of vulnerable limbo, awaiting formal residency, if not outright alien status, Gidelia brandished the font of her own fears, holding hostage her own crutch of security.
Only Joanne, among Gidelia's peers on the Pud payroll, could lay claim to a true soundness, one of the scarce natives. As the apex of the trophic chain saw humankind atop it, all else subject to serfdom, a fate of joints boiled to jolly jellies, so reflected Joanne's safety due to citizenship.
Gidelia's homeland, hamstrung by the country she now called home, she entrusted her ongoing migrant status to exercising the threat of exile and expulsion to those exposed as she.
1
Yoland Fuchs was heir to a rice pudding company, her ancestor’s confectioners in the days of the 19th century robber barons in the Ohio River.
Yoland’s rice pudding business had always characterised itself as one with Pittsburgh, crucible of the US industrialist American Dream, out of the ashes of US Steel. A home of titans of heavy industry.
A Yinzer, native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to her veins, the so-called City of Bridges abided by Yoland's every whim to reach the uppermost echelons of American corporate crust.
Nibbling away at the vestiges of British mercantilism from which the soil of Penn’s former colony rose to statehood. A gift from King George III to Sir William Penn sprang the City of Brotherly Love via his son upon the shores of the Delaware River. Penn's namesake offspring to sowing the seeds of the forest land.
At the confluence of the Allegheny, Ohio and Monongahela sat, a Pennsylvania borough monikered of William Pitt the Elder. 18th century British statesman, Prime Minister, sympathiser for the colonial ambitions within the American Revolution. An active proponent of Pax Britannica and its expansion against imperial competitors.
Yoland’s family settled alongside Germanics taking flights for more pious grounds, the other Germans being the Pennsylvania Dutch, a misnomer of sorts. A term lost in translation to outside communities from the original Deutsch, the German word for 'German' i.e. Pennsylvania German.
Pittsburgh was a heartland of blue-collar industry, white-collar capital accumulating from its profitability. BNY Mellon, of the famous Mellon family, anchored Pittsburgh’s finance industry. Home to modern, innovative R&D efforts from Carnegie Mellon University, again of the Mellon namesake, as well as the Scottish American tycoon, Andrew Carnegie, whose ventures gave birth to US Steel.
Yoland had never met a member of the Mellon clan, despite both families being household names as Pittsburgh tycoons. Yoland sometimes daydreamed what it must be like to have holdings in such formidable fields of banking and oil.
Her self-esteem in food processing was secure - her family’s products adorned the pantry shelves of every single American home. Her foodstuffs were the first a native-born American sampled following breastfeeding. If you are what you eat, at least some part of each American was made by her company’s product.
The same applied with petroleum. The lifeblood of the industrialised world, if one drove into a Gulf Oil station to fill up their vehicle’s tank, then the Mellon legacy would touch those customers, but otherwise, it couldn’t be fairly argued Gulf Oil touched the daily lives directly of each and every American, living inside them on a cellular level like metabolised pudding.
Heavy industry and manufacturing had given way to services, as true an emblem of progress of all developed countries. In that way, Pittsburgh’s heritage cemented the fiction of what Yoland looked to revive - a reanimation of a bygone era for good reason. When wages rise, manufacturing must shift elsewhere, seeking cheaper labour inputs.
Yoland bridled at China and Japan as the modern-day creditors financing the US. Yoland interpreted this as loss, yet for her empire to blossom, Pud needed to import rice from East Asia.
Yoland’s duties devolved far from managing Pud's relationships with Chinese suppliers. She thought fit to rail against a trade imbalance, oblivious she was a driver of it. Pud profited from the low costs of Chinese agricultural output.
Yoland did not understand China, nor wanted to. She paid little heed to China’s nominal communism, seeing it more through the lens of Deng’s 1978 reforms. Still, its vastness was overwhelming. From a soft power perspective, nothing cultural about the Middle Kingdom fascinated her.
China to Yoland was soy sauce, people cycling to and from textile and toy manufacturing jobs - little else. Economic colossus by sheer population size. The US germinated any technological initiatives from her perspective.
Yoland was sanguine about America’s place in the 21st century. To her mind, the ‘American Century,’ coined by Time editor Henry Luce, would sustain.
In the modern day, ‘America’ is synonymous with the 48 contiguous, and 2 non-contiguous states of a federal republic, spanning the North American continent from “sea to shining sea”, at the expense of the other 34 sovereign states in the Americas.
Manifest Destiny saw to it the sons and daughters of the Sons of Liberty, throughout the generations, would look upon liberty as an incorruptible, high-minded virtue, deifying novelist Ayn Rand to a philosopher-queen.
The Russian Revolution, ushering in the one-party rule of Vladimir Lenin’s Russian Communist Party, in the bitterest twist of ironies, is what libertarian acolytes owe their intellectual guiding light upon.
Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire, epicentre of the February Revolution. Rand née Rosenbaum’s father’s business was confiscated in the upheaval, seeking shelter in the anti-communist, White Russian-held Crimea.
Rand took solace and edified in the ways of laissez-faire capitalism and cold reason thereafter - rejecting altruism, embracing egoism.
The only ostensible parameters were the borders cartographers such as the land’s namesake Vespucci nominally agreed as a shared fiction.
Even this was undermined for the conceit it was. America implicitly suggested two continents of landmass, occupying an entire hemisphere of the planet.
To this conceit and shared fiction, could Yoland believe. To the shared lie of a Florentine’s lines on a map, she envisioned a fortune leading a Spanish conquistador to weep in contrast to his vast auric bonanza.
Pud rice pudding was a household brand name. Used as a proprietary phrase for rice pudding in general - like Jell-O for jelly or Frisbee for frisbees.
Yoland never ate Pud, seldom even eating rice. She seldom spoke even of rice pudding. Business she talked of - deals, competitors, wining and dining prospective stakeholders.